NoelC

It sure makes one ask oneself: I'm using Windows Defender... Why? Is it because I trust Microsoft to look after my best interests? Loss of trust doesn't a good partnership make. -Noel

What about the offer some people are reporting happening at bootup now? Is that separate? I think a leap to stating it will be easier to reject is overstepping. You ain't seen nuthin' yet meets a sucker born every minute. -Noel

Yes, that could grow up. It's also possible - though it wouldn't be my preference - that Linux with a more mature WINE subsystem could do the job. I wonder if a corporation big enough to do that and provide commercial support could be kept from turning evil... -Noel

So far the most compelling argument overall to "upgrade" is this, based on history: If you want to stay in the thick of things, keeping current has numerous if intangible advantages. If keeping up with the technology is important to you - be it for business or personal reasons - temporarily holding back works as long as ultimately you do finally upgrade. However, swimming against the current WILL prove tiring. That being said, I can imagine - given the popularity of Windows 7 - that there will be a real following for Windows 7 who want to keep it viable for a long, long time. And of course it's never a black and white situation. You might choose, for example, to run Windows 10 on some systems, 8.1 on others, and 7 on still others. It needs to be whatever makes sense - regardless of what Microsoft wants you to do. I guess it's too much to hope for that everything new offers more value than everything it replaces. Those days seem over. History has shown us that to ultimately remain in business, the OS vendor has to sooner or later deliver value, or be brushed aside. Microsoft has built up such a legacy and market that it has the luxury of screwing up literally for years and still survive. But that won't keep. Sooner or later the rubber will have to meet the road and things will have to get better. Or another company will come along and eat Microsoft's lunch. Frankly I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. I see no reason why an OS that truly provides Win32 compatibility and a solid, serious computing experience can't be developed. THAT would then be the way forward for all who need serious computing, vs. fun 'n games. -Noel

I can offer a potential strategy for managing Windows Update in 10 that would probably meet your goals. As with most Windows 10 tweaks it would require more ongoing effort, but it IS doable. I've been using it for a while with all my Windows systems, including Win 10. 1. Configure your Computer Configuration > Windows Components > Windows Update : Configure Automatic Updates policy to Disabled to disallow automatic updating. This gets you most of the way there. 2. To be sure, disable the Windows Firewall and Windows Update services with Services.msc. 3. I know you run the Sphinx firewall. To be really, really sure, reconfigure it not to allow Windows Updates to succeed. In this state, Windows will not abuse your bandwidth downloading updates except when you initiate the process. Note: Windows Defender WILL still download malware definitions - disabling that is possible too but with different tactics, and you may actually want to allow the auto-update of definitions. Now, when you DO want to check for updates, the process goes something like this... 4. Reconfigure Sphinx firewall to allow svchost to reach the Windows Update servers it will need. In my case I reassign to a zone I've pre-configured to specifically allow the 10 or so windows update servers and nothing else (no telemetry / stats, for example). I can provide more detail if you want. 5. Go into Services.msc and reconfigure the Windows Update service to Manual, Start it, then reconfigure back to Disabled. 6. Do the same as step 5 with Windows Firewall. 7. Use the WUShowHide tool (KB3073930) to request the list of available updates. 8. If you see updates there that you don't want, hide them. If you see updates you DO want, do step 9. 9. Start Settings (the only modern App I've retained), navigate into Update & security, and do [ Check for updates ], which will cause the download. 10. If you don't reboot, just stop the Windows Update and Windows Firewall services. 11. Reconfigure Sphinx back to normal to disallow Windows Updates. Note: In my case I have removed ALL rules from the stock Windows Firewall, so that even when I do enable that service (now apparently required by Windows Update in Win 10) it allows nothing more than what Sphinx lets through. Just it being running is enough apparently. -Noel

All over the planet many of us have brought to bear so much knowledge and 3rd party software (and maybe even written a little ourselves) to both undo many of the things Microsoft did and to nudge Windows 8.1 in the good directions that Vista/7 were going. 8.1 hadn't yet been altered so fundamentally as to make that impossible. We're recognizing that it may not be possible to do with later versions. It's not our resistance to change. It's not that there's something that we've yet to discover. I don't know how far each of you reading this have taken Win 10 in the same vein, but I have done all I can do to it, with the help of many others here and elsewhere. What have we learned about Win 10's ability to be tweaked? With even more effort, and more disruptive tweaks, it CAN be modded into a better desktop-only system. But it hasn't yet really offered anything interesting or attractive to offset the negatives. I expected better Apps by now, didn't you? Many tweaks are becoming so opposite from what Microsoft supports that they're not really viable/maintainable. Re-theming has become possible, though there are some things that no longer respond well (e.g,. the Taskbar). Microsoft is removing things without providing acceptable substitutes. Public ridicule causes them to put back one or two occasionally. Designers are starting to embrace the horrible flat, lifeless UI, and slowly forget how to create usable, well-integrated desktop applications. Worst of all, Microsoft is actively disrupting the customization we might choose to do by regularly releasing incompatible builds. I had build 10286 looking and working nicely (as far as it goes) then along came 10586. Now after more effort I have a decent looking and working 10586 and lo and behold in a month we can expect a 14xxx that will just blow that all away. I crammed a bunch of knowledge into a re-tweaker, and sure as shootin' every new 14xxx build breaks something it does. They read about all the tweaks here that we so freely share. They could use the knowledge of what people want to drive development, but nooooo... I've grown weary of trying to re-discover yet another way to achieve the same thing, and even with an active user community we simply can't compete with the people who a) have the source code and b) are actively thwarting whatever we do, on purpose. And have you noticed, new processes keep showing up? Is the value the OS provides US expanding proportionately? I'm not seeing it. It's just getting more and more bloated - and with the gargantuan set of resources I've built into my computer I imagine I care less than most. Look, we've all bent over backwards to try to meet Microsoft halfway. They aren't having it. They're executing to a "break it" mentality and trying to CHANGE us and our goals WAY TOO QUICKLY. And without anything decent too change TO. What is there about Apps that hasn't already been done in a web page? That nothing really interesting is happening in the App world after years of development (free Visual Studio everyone?) tells us that the UWP model just doesn't have what it takes to take over the reigns. And has anyone EVER used "high performance" and "App" in the same sentence? Performance does matter. Sorry, Microsoft, I skipped ME, pre-SP Vista, and Windows 8.0, and like many others (hello, hundreds of millions of Win 7 users who STILL haven't upgraded) I'm skipping Windows 10 until you give it sufficient value to make it an actual advance over its predecessors. I could have been your greatest supporter (note who's here promoting Windows 8.1) but you're not getting one penny more from me until that happens, and who knows? I might even influence a person or two besides myself. The truth matters. -Noel Edit: One more thing I didn't mention AT ALL yet... TRUST Microsoft simultaneously wants us to TRUST them to keep our data safe in their cloud, then at the same time pulls stunts like presenting GWX dialogs to catch distracted users with big shiny buttons, downloading gigabytes without asking first, reverting privacy settings... Edit 2: Lastly, in the vein of this thread - HARDWARE: Are computer systems advancing enough any more to drive us to buy all new hardware and with it get a new OS? I looked recently... Any new hardware I'D want (e.g., Dell Precision T7910 workstation) is shipped new today with Win 8.1, with an available downgrade to 7. The world is not tolerating Microsoft's game.

I know you asked xpclient, but for what it's worth, some of my favorite tweaks are here, here, here, and here, among other places on this forum. I also wrote a decent eBook on it. -Noel

Great thread, Gaurav. I've been using Win 8.1 Pro upgraded to MCE for as long as it's been available. I've never reinstalled it and I've run it as long as two months straight with heavy daily use, until something like a display driver update or other install made me to reboot it. I no longer ever worry about whether the system is going to fail and lose my work. It just doesn't fail. With Aero Glass and the Aero7 theme overlaid with my custom theme atlas (plus metrics tweaks) I've made the desktop quite beautiful to use. Classic Shell of course has been a mainstay on all my systems since way back when. I have a now not so state of the art ATI Radeon HD 7850 video card that drives 3 monitors for a total of 4960 x 1600 pixels, and everything is butter smooth. My center monitor is a big one, though not quite 4K (it's 2560 x 1600 pixels). I'm glad I didn't get a high DPI monitor, actually. Very little software is up to the task even today. All my monitors are right about 100 ppi, and save for the slight space between them for the bezels, my desktop is well-integrated. It's been possible to de-provision and remove all the Metro/Modern/UWP BS Apps and I always keep UAC completely turned off. This works GREAT for a geek's geek system and I believe I've gotten very good value out of it. I had used Win 7 for 3 years prior, about half that time on this same (fairly powerful) workstation hardware, and I skipped Windows 8.0 entirely. Overall the Win 8.1 file system is in some ways a little slower than that of 7 and in some ways a little faster. I find Win 8.1 multitasks better and does lots of things simultaneously more smoothly than Windows 7 did, and the desktop doesn't "load up" as easily or become sluggish. Believe me, with this system I notice right away if anything takes long enough to respond to actually notice. I never, ever have to worry about how much stuff I've started. At one point just for fun I even started up Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, and 10 virtual machines running on it simultaneously, and I *still* couldn't sense any delays in desktop activity. I've worked around all the shortcomings experienced vs. Win 7. For example, Win 8 dropped the Windows Backup UI, but it's easy enough to schedule VSS-integrated System Image backups using a wbadmin command, and as time goes on I think I like command line operation where you can really get down to the nitty gritty better and better. Office 2003 didn't work right on Win 8.1, and I didn't really feel a need to upgrade it otherwise but I ended up getting a license for Office 2010 and in the end it's a little bit of an upgrade with a very natural transition from 2003. It brings the applications up to 64 bits and actually works pretty well with Aero Glass and re-themed desktop controls. In the end I'm glad to have it. Overall I find Win 8.1 if anything a little MORE likely to try to "spill the beans" online than even Windows 10. That makes sense - after all, it's 10 that finally pushed the public over the edge and has gotten all the privacy attention. But it's nothing that can't be worked around with plenty of individual tweaks (there's no O&O ShutUp8.1) and a good deny-by-default firewall setup (thank you again for introducing me to Sphinx; I've been working with the author and he's going to have some GREAT things coming out soon). The Task Manager from the WinRE environment is essentially the old Windows 7 Task Manager, so the dumbed-down Task Manager is no longer the only girl at the ball and thus no longer a shortcoming of Windows 8. I had achieved the ability to see into ISO files on Win 7 through 3rd party software, so the ability to mount an ISO in 8.1 isn't that big a deal, but I DO use it. I've used DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /Restore-Health I think twice, after Microsoft screwed up the servicing database with updates, and that's been nice to have. There was a problem with a recurring message implying a security failure, but a permissions tweak fixed that forever more. For a while I missed the Previous Versions feature, but have restored all that functionality and then some with the use of a 3rd party VSS access tool called Z-VSScopy. One of its nice features is an Explorer-like window that give you a view into whatever snapshot you've selected. I've had "scroll wheel moves whatever window the mouse is hovering over" turned on for a long time. But to be fair I had that with Win 7 as well courtesy a tool called WizMouse. When I open Explorer windows to particular locations (e.g., courtesy shortcuts I've created) they start in the same place they were last. This is accomplished with a tool called ShellFolderFix, which works equally well in 8.1 as 7. My Explorer windows have more closely spaced list view items drawn with darker text, courtesy a nice tool from T800 Productions called Folder Options X. With the ribbon closed up the Windows File Explorer pane can be configured to show a little more work and less vertical boilerplate in 8 vs. 7, which I like. The OS takes advantage of the non-uniform memory addressing scheme I've selected in the BIOS configuration, so - assuming a little luck - both CPU packages can be addressing their own memory through their own channels simultaneously. I'm not sure the kernel in Win 7 could take advantage of NUMA. Perhaps this is why multitasking seems smoother. I have 6 SSDS and 3 HDDs inside the chassis, and one of the HDDs is formatted ReFS, which 7 could not do I also have two external MyBook USB drives permanently connected to facilitate regular backups, and one of THOSE is also formatted ReFS. Neither of the ReFS volumes have EVER given me a lick of trouble. ReFS really works. I figured they'd go ahead and roll it out in Win 10 but nooooo... I'm also running several different forms of RAID on both SSDs and HDDs and it all just works together seamlessly. I guess you could say that NTFS is also better on Win 8.1 because of it's newer self-healing abilities. VMware Workstation works flawlessly (as it did under Windows 7). For a while I ran Collabnet's Subversion Server on Win 8.1 quite nicely, though I've since migrated it to its own Windows 7 system. It just didn't seem right to have the company jewels hosted on my workstation, however stable it is. Windows 8.1 plays music perfectly while I'm working (I often listen to Pandora or my own files). I've never had it skip/pop/stutter no matter what I do. Honestly, I really never had flaws to speak of with Windows 7 or even Vista, though. This Win 8.1 system also plays even the highest definition video beautifully. I had an HD TV tuner for a while, but when our cable system was replaced by fiber optics the tuner became obsolete, and I haven't used Windows Media Center since. I haven't used a 3rd party antivirus package in years. Frankly, Windows Defender has never caught anything, so it's hard to say what's better. I have a good security environment, so I don't need an AV at all. I run regular scans with MBAM and it never finds anything. Not saying Win 8.1 is better in this area, because MSE is really just as good on Win 7. That's all I can think of that's pertinent right now. I'd say that in summary, other than the few things I've bolded above I don't find Win 8.1 superior for any particular features, per se, but that it's more polished (other than the out-of-box fugly desktop). More polished and more capable where it counts, under the hood. -Noel

Since we're on the subject of ClearType... The ClearType Tuner doesn't work properly on a multi-monitor system since Windows 8. I have two monitors on the side turned up sideways and that works great except that it's impossible to tune ClearType on the side monitors to avoid doing color subsampling. So in a fashion, Internet Explorer's lack of color subsampling is actually better for my side monitors. Kind of a funny twist of fate when two bugs cancel eachother out. -Noel

>I have no idea what the MS guys are doing to the theme mechanism every new build... I'd say they're systematically making it as difficult as possible to alter. In any case, it's wrong to think a prototype or even recently released OS can easily be re-themed, which by definition relies on undocumented, unsupported operations. Microsoft is doing all this stuff on purpose precisely because they DON'T want us re-theming or changing the OS outside of their minimal settings any more. Ask yourself this: Does releasing a new operating system several times a year make any sense for any other reason? They want to lead, not be user-driven, and you do that by keeping users - especially savvy users - constantly in "catch up" mode. People WILL get tired of constantly having to re-do their tweaks. If I were using Windows 10 for anything other than a test VM - which I don't plan to change any time soon - I'd certainly set my system up for the 3 month new release delay, though even that is not enough. A new OS every few years makes some sense. Not more often. -Noel

Is it just me or does the mixing of a big bold button with smaller text in the form of links say that Microsoft is pulling back just as little as possible from their predatory stance? And what do the other screens (available via the > on the right side) look like??? -Noel

We might say that there are two groups of people in the rest of the world, if we were the types who categorize things... 1. Savvy, experienced people who know implicitly that any OS out of the box isn't perfect and should be considered a blank slate on which to build. 2. Ignorant people who react in knee-jerk fashion to soundbites and who can't or won't get beyond what's delivered out-of-the-box. Of course there are never hard and fast lines. I've been known to react to things myself with too little info, and a lot of people "get it" even without years of experience (look at the popularity of this site). But this characterization is for the sake of argument. Frankly I don't care as much what the latter group - however big a majority you may think they are - thinks of my advice. It's a person's own responsibility to see to it that their own education is advanced. I'm not really hoping to influence base newcomers except to point out that someone who knows what they're doing can actually do very well indeed with Windows 8.1. If they recognize that, then they're not so ignorant and there's hope. IF a young, naïve, but otherwise intelligent person WERE to adopt Win 8.1 per my comments then find it to be lacking out-of-the-box, that person might just go online, find their way here or some other Windows tweaking site, then start down the road to making it better. Is there anything wrong with that? What alternatives would you propose? That they go with Win 7 instead? XP? What OS is likely to become useless sooner? I have a lot of experience and think I know a thing or two about what makes an OS useful. Rest assured I'd be describing how well I was doing with Win 10 and trying to spread the word on just how to do it instead of praising 8.1 if Win 10 were actually better with any amount of tweaking or augmentation. For the moment it's just not. And Microsoft is seeing to it that it won't be any time soon (August 2 anniversary release de-stabilization, anyone?). -Noel

And for those who were hoping to have a look at what's actually in the anniversary update before making the decision to upgrade? Zzzzt. Fail. Clearly Microsoft doesn't want people looking. They're not proud of what's in there. Instead they want people basing their decision on 10586.420. Why? IMO because 10586 has been stable now for the longest time of any Win 10 release. People WANT stability. People WANT a system they can mold to their needs, without the legs of the chair being kicked out from under them. -Noel

I have to say that it feels a bit awkward that you seem to feel an ongoing need to protect the rest of the world from my Windows advice. You may not be giving people around here enough credit. This site is all about turning Windows into something better. I'm certainly not the only one who knows how to tweak settings and augment an operating system with decent 3rd party tools. I'll wager most here do it. Nor am I the only one who likes Win 8.1 (@GreenHillManiac and @JodyT come to mind). I've learned some of and published most of what I know how to do right here on this very forum, such as this and this and this and even this. Thing is, much of it isn't specific to Windows 8.1. As you have already noted, it is my opinion that all Windows OSs need a fair bit of work to be useful and stable. Windows 7 needs almost as much tweaking, though the desktop looks better out of the box. -Noel

I haven't had any instability with the Crimson 16.3.2 driver. But I don't game. FYI, I have read that the Windows 10 anniversary release is likely to be AFTER the drop dead date for the free "upgrade". http://www.askwoody.com/2016/win10-anniversary-update-on-aug-2/ -Noel

Thanks for clarifiying that for everyone, jaclaz, though I wonder why you seem to feel such a strong need to do so again and again. I can't quite tell if you're embarrassed for me or trying to protect the world from thinking Windows 8 could possibly be any good for anyone but me or what. In any case, as I have it set up it does just what I need day in and day out reliably, quickly, and looks good doing it. That's the advantage of an OS that isn't replaced for years at a time - you can get good at setting it up and using it. That's acknowledging a lot of what makes MSFN great. To be fair, none of the OSs as delivered by MS were ideal out of the box. XP wasn't bad, but pretty austere and not quite over Microsoft's humble beginnings where everything wasn't 100% perfect and needed rebooting every now and then. For UI richness Vista probably got closer than any other and it really matured the move to 64 bit. 7 was a nice refinement (kind of a Vista.5), with a few regressions, but even more usability in many ways, and - importantly - serious and very business-oriented. 7 was probably the end of the line for systems that were good for doing what users need without much effort, though. Win 8 both refined the kernel a little BUT ALSO started down the road to frivolity with Apps (none of which I allow on my 8.1 system). But 8.1 still has it where it matters under the hood and with some plastic surgery can be made into a very good desktop system on a real computer. Now it's mature - and to me mature is anything but boring. I always judge what Windows can be turned into and they've finally broken the tweakability of 10 more than anything else by changing policy to not leave it alone for a few years. They've made it impossible to keep it tweaked and I just don't see a whole lot of benefit in being constantly cloud-connected. I certainly don't want my private information taken from my disk by the OS maker. Thing is, Microsoft almost accomplished critical mass... If only they would stretch their timescales out to, say, 3x to 4x what they are then I believe Win 10 could become palatable... For example, I actually have tweaked and augmented both Win 10 builds 10240 and 10586 to the point where they were stable and pretty much usable. It took 4 to 5 months to do that after release - hell, they were/are even private online. But boom, then they just go and release an all new OS that breaks those tweaks. They're about to do it again. Sure, they DO offer a 3 month delay in the Windows Update process, but it's not quite enough. Maybe 6 months would be enough, with a 1 year new version schedule. Sure, I could delay the update further myself, but tell me why I should have to fight against Microsoft to do what I can already do without nearly so much of a fight? And hey, maybe the LTSB would be my cup o tea, but I just can't license the Enterprise code without a serious wasted expenditure. Anecdotes... 1. I have on a number of recent occasions - being a geek of very many decades - thought to myself, "gee, this is finally the system I always dreamed of having". 2. A very good friend of mine, a literal genius with more experience than I have and with whom I collaborate on software projects, used Windows 7 for years. I bought him the Win 7 Ultimate retail box back in 2009, actually. He runs Windows in a VMware Fusion virtual machine on his iMac to do Windows development. I could never get him to move up to 8.1 because he doesn't have the patience I do for tweaking and augmenting and polishing an OS. He's even more about using it to get things done than I am. Not long ago he upgraded (a copy of) his 7 VM to Win 10. I helped him with the setup and we got everything working. Then he promptly dropped back to using his Win 7 VM, and that's where he does his work today. Chalk up another brilliant mind refusing to use Windows 10. -Noel

Agreed - a multi-level approach seems prudent indeed. I also have set up a deny-by-default 3rd party firewall configuration, so any "new and improved" telemetry is going to fail, and I'm going to know about it. The DNS server I'm using is Dual DHCP DNS Server, available as an open source project here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dhcp-dns-server/ As you described, it can be run on the same system it's being used on. I had to tweak the source to be able to handle a large wildcard blacklist, but it was pretty straightforward to do. At some point I'll join the developer team for the package and submit my changes. -Noel

I guess the price isn't certain - though yours is as good a guess as any. I've secured a license for my remaining Win 7 system. Did that around the time of the release of build 10240. But it will remain running Win 7 indefinitely. Not going to bother for my main Win 8.1 workstation. Frankly, even though I'm confident I could roll it back just the downtime from screwing around to just secure a "free" license I *may* choose to use in the future just isn't worth it to me. And of source the future outlook for a Win 8.1 system is a little brighter for a Win 8.1 system than Win 7. Same approach I took with Win 8.0 and I don't regret it even though I finally moved up to 8.1 when it came out. We can only HOPE that it will come to pass that Win 10 will ultimately have enough value that we'll all want to upgrade to it "whether it be tomorrow or five years from now". I personally haven't seen enough evidence so far to think that it's inevitable, though. Not yet. I am going to reserve my final decision until I see what Redstone 1 looks like in released trim. Based on the pre-release software builds I'm pretty sure my point of view won't change. If they don't manage to release it prior to the drop dead date, oh well. EDIT: I have just learned that the anniversary release is likely to be in early August (owing to a "mistakenly" leaked Microsoft blog post). -Noel

I think AMD must be struggling to pay its engineers, and thus looking to cut costs in any way they can. They're dropping features with each new release of Crimson, which is the driver suite that followed their Catalyst drivers. Calling them out on it only results in the support drones telling you to do something different, even when that something doesn't address the functionality they eliminated. -Noel

Y'know, having a system gather telemetry data, then just block the sending of it is a bit like living on the edge... 1. It takes system resources (CPU, disk space) to gather it. At the very least it's going to slightly reduce the goodness of your computing experience. 2. It's then poised and ready to take advantage of any momentary hole that appears in your blocking strategy. Let's say you have to do an in-place upgrade to recover from a problem, or install some other new update that reverts privacy settings, or... Boom, a few megabytes/gigabytes get through the crack in the dam before you know it, and then the cat's out of the bag; it's all been for nothing. Oh, and one more thing... Regarding blocking telemetry via hosts... There are some telemetry servers that can't easily be blocked by entries in your hosts file - for example there are a whole bunch of Azure telemetry servers that have the form az______.vo.msecnd.net. For that reason I've added wildcarded entries in my DNS server. Note that most people don't run their own DNS server or have wildcarding capabiliity: *vortex.data.microsoft.com=0.0.0.0 *vortex-win.data.microsoft.com=0.0.0.0 *settings-win.data.microsoft.com=0.0.0.0 *vo.msecnd.net=0.0.0.0 *telemetry.microsoft.com=0.0.0.0 And some applications - such as Visual Studio - don't actually heed the system telemetry settings you may have set. With all my system settings tweaked for greatest privacy, owing to the above settings I have STILL seen these attempts blocked (noting "not found")... C:\TEMP>checkdnslogs "(vortex.data.microsoft.com|vortex-win.data.microsoft.com|settings-win.data.microsoft.com|.vo.msecnd.net|telemetry.microsoft.com).*not found" | sed -e "s/^.*\, //g" | gsort -u az361816.vo.msecnd.net A not found az416426.vo.msecnd.net A not found az512334.vo.msecnd.net A not found az590556.vo.msecnd.net A not found az616578.vo.msecnd.net A not found az623152.vo.msecnd.net A not found az648995.vo.msecnd.net A not found az667904.vo.msecnd.net A not found az700632.vo.msecnd.net A not found az705183.vo.msecnd.net A not found az712685.vo.msecnd.net A not found az725175.vo.msecnd.net A not found az743373.vo.msecnd.net A not found az743556.vo.msecnd.net A not found az803469.vo.msecnd.net A not found az835927.vo.msecnd.net A not found az840064.vo.msecnd.net A not found mscomajax.vo.msecnd.net A not found settings-win.data.microsoft.com A not found sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com A not found telemetry.microsoft.com A not found v10.vortex-win.data.microsoft.com A not found vortex-win.data.microsoft.com A not found vortex.data.microsoft.com A not found web.vortex.data.microsoft.com A not found Vortex indeed... Yes, Microsoft technically admits that it sucks! -Noel

For what it's worth I'm still running Win 8.1 MCE and have had no problems. That 99 bucks didn't hurt me any. Win 8.1 has been the best Windows OS I have ever used bar none - and I use it heavily - though I am also running Win 7 Ultimate on another system that I use less interactively (but which runs 24/7) and it gives me no problems either, whatsoever. Regarding the Win 10 "upgrade"... Not even for free as it removes value for me. And my computer's good enough to run probably another 5 years. If they ever do add enough value to Windows 10 to make it attractive to me I'll consider purchasing it. However, I really don't anticipate that happening and so I haven't/won't go to any lengths to lock in a free license. -Noel

Yeah, $10K could break the bank for Microsoft. Think how many copies of Win 10 they'll have to sell to pay for that settlement. I'm surprised the deal didn't come with a gag clause. I wonder if a "What EULA?" defense would fly. -Noel

Perhaps they only hassle bloggers and people whose uploaded bank account information shows they have some extra disposable income. Just the fact that they're already running Windows 10 already says something about their gullibility. ;-) In all seriousness, is there any possibility that particular kinds of computers (e.g,. a Lenovo Laptop or a Samsung Tablet, etc.) might get certain software, per agreements between Microsoft and the makers of those systems? Microsoft would consider that extra "services" are being provided to those users whose computer maker is now in bed with them. -Noel

Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is what I use. It's free though it most certainly isn't trivial to install (it's a multi-gigabyte package, you have to pick from a LOT of options, and the installer takes the better part of an hour even on a supercomputer). I develop graphics applications where performance is critical and often have need for highly efficient code to sweep through pixels. I am literally amazed at how well the optimizer in VS 2015 works... We use the "Maximize Speed" optimization setting, and with some care in coding the sources it often reduces loops to all register-based machine code. For example, note the generated code for the doubly-nested loops in this code snippet. I thought this was impressive... Don't get me wrong - I'm not at all for Microsoft's current direction toward cloud-integration and fondness for sending your information to their servers, but right now I'm getting good value out of VS 2015 (I'm running it on Win 8.1 and 7). I have a secure network and I actually do see my firewall blocking telemetry back to Microsoft. I don't know what your sensitivity to this is, so I'm mentioning it. Oh, and I only recently learned that in order to have VS 2015 avoid automatically building telemetry into YOUR application, you have to actively include notelemetry.obj into the link. You have to watch Microsoft like a hawk, but their development tools are actually pretty good. -Noel

Eh? Why? Up to 0.2 on a scale of 10. Not bad! -Noel